died of liver cancer in a New York City hospital. But the original memorial—where people still gather each summer to drop wreathes into the water—was erected in 1923. A statue: bronze sailor in heavy storm gear leaning into a ship’s spoked steering wheel keeps watch. New names are added each year. Maximus, to Gloucester, Sunday, July 19 …and they stopped before that bad sculpture of a fisherman -”as if one were to talk to a man’s house, knowing not what gods or heroes are”not knowing what a fisherman is instead of going straight to the Bridge and doing no more than- saying no more than in the Carybdises of the Cut waters the flowers tear off the wreaths the flowers turn the character of the sea The sea jumps the fate of the flower The drowned men are undrowned in the eddies...
I’m not sure what I was looking for in Gloucester—a trace of Olson beyond what he left in his books; an anchor perhaps, some insight into the leviathan of his life’s work. Did I find it? Hard to say. Evidence of Charles Olson in Gloucester is limited to a six-inch plaque. But perhaps, ironically, the city is the wrong place to look for this poet so concerned with geography, with polis. Olson attempted, in The Maximus Poems, to become the city of Gloucester, to sink so deeply into his location as to become inextricable from it. Olson is Maximus is Gloucester: a man, a position, a point of reference. Get by the way The Maximus Poems: I live actually on the dot exactly of the i in Point in Fort Point on the cover. I never noticed it until this moment and it felt like news, to tell you. Also, I was raised in a house which is the ear on the g of Stage (Fort) on the back cover, of the same. —To Joyce Benson, June 14, 1966
Olson, Selected Letters, 157.
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